Birric on Ethics by Birric Forcella
=Birric On Ethics= (Expanded version. Also cleaned up. Last version was garbled. 2008-05-01) In the last few months I have been regularly ridiculed and vilified over my stance on ethics, morals, etc. Here it is in a nutshell. I At all times and in all places man has adored and worshipped the very millstones hanging around his neck. The only thing ethicists can and will do is create more prisons. The prison camp keepers do not care where the pretexts come from under which people are being put away. The manufacturers of those pretexts are called ethicists. The butchers of humanity do not care how the stream of their victims is generated. They do not care if they destroy the lives of drug users, illegal aliens, sexual deviants, the politically incorrect, the opinionally unwanted, money launderers, or anybody, no matter how innocent. As long as a continuous stream - a torrent, today - of victims is generated in some way--in any way--they will rule. Lawmakers create this stream of victims by creating ever more laws. That is what lawmakers do. Every new law will add to the pool of lawbreakers to be put away, to be vilified, to be demonized. With few exceptions, all people in today's prisons are objectively innocent. Ethicists are the diligent sociopathic enablers behind all perpetrators of wholesale human misery. The thirst to uphold ever more values, to make things ever more good and ever more virtuous and ever more moral is unslakable. Ethicists identify an ever greater reservoir of behaviors that can be and must be condemned and suppressed - if not directly by them, then surely by others who stand ready to do their dirty work with a vengeance. Ethicists create the tools for human suffering and death, tools that will be used and have been used over and over again. For thousands of years ethicists have created the very suffering they purport to alleviate. The true enablers of all human horror and misery are the single "ethical" individuals and ethical philosophers. II This is the nature of ethics itself: As I have stated many times, there is no such thing as morals or ethics proper. Just like theology, they have no content. All morals are created by your sense of pleasure. All your acts are ultimately what YOU want to do. Ethics is merely a smokescreen designed to avoid responsibility. You are saying "some reasoned chain of arguments made me do it." In truth, it is always what YOU desire to do, never anything else. If you ground your ethics in some god, then you are saying "god made me do it." Bullshit. There is not such thing as ethics or morals. The problems with ethics and morals is, of course, not "moral knowledge." We all can know caboodles of different moral schemes and understand the reasonings by which they operate. The problem lies with the fact that morality is private and different for every person. Yes, it is colored by your culture, but only to a degree. Just as every religionist, in his heart of hearts, creates a god according to his own, superbly idiosyncratic specifications, so every moralist has his own smorgasbord of "ethical" options from which he puts together his own moral code. Needless to say, nobody ever gets to look into this private process, and what is given as a justification to the outside world must be suspect to the highest degree. The louder and the more noisily and urgently a moral code comes across, the more obviously it is a front for unstated prejudice and hidden emotions. The more books you write about ethics, the more you prove that you have lots to hide. The more you need to convice others of your righteousness, the more you prove that you are desperately craving to convince yourself that you are right. Ethics and morals, as I have said many times, are a symptom of a divided self. The ethical and moral person is compelled to find principles to guide himself because he has never learned to trust himself and his emotions. In the final analysis it is the person himself who is making up his own ethics, just as any religious believer makes up his own god. Moving the illusion of decision one step away from you and putting it into the pretense of being guided by outside principles and arguments merely serves to camouflage the fact that all the millions of “ethical” people come up each with their own private ethics and morals. Ethics is the delusion of being guided by “principles.” Without exception, it is a cover for private prejudice. I will pit the simple straightforward truth of my character gladly and at any time against the best your deluded ethical claptrap has to offer. However, the process divides the self of a person into a "moral" part and into a part that needs to be controlled. This is the reason for the persistence of original sin and all the compulsive need for condemnation described in the first section. There is no hope for an end to human suffering until this division of the self has been abolished. This division, and with it ethics and morality, is the true Mark of Cain. Anybody who feels he has something inside himself that needs to be "controlled" bears it. Any ethical or moral scheme, from Nazi ideology to Quaker saintliness operates exactly in the same way. III There is a difference in individuals as to how much they are obsessed with ethical and moral thoughts. The more healthy and the more at one you are with your own self (the less divided it is) the less you are worrying about your ethical conduct. You are as you are and you are good that way. However, the more the demons inside you need holding down, the more you will be obsessed with ethics and morals. As most people cannot do this alone and actually feel quite helpless before the "evil" inside themselves (after all, it is their own self), they start to enlist the people around them to help in their fight, much like the model of a support group. They surround themselves with people of same faith or conviction. As this fails, they try to enlist the culture and country at large and try to pass or strengthen laws that they hope will help in their private fight. The collateral damage in innocent victims, as in the war on drugs or prostitution, etc., is of no concern for these "ethical" people. Much as Hitler and all other dictators and bullies, they don't care if they destroy millions of lives in their fight with their private obsessions. This larger fight takes the form described in the first section. While the same mechanism is at work in every case of ethical claims, it can be seen especially clearly and openly in the case of the religious conservative homophobe. Attempting to hold down the demon of homoerotic attraction within themselves, they try to enlist society at large in their private fight. They have passed laws and created an atmosphere that victimized millions and cost millions of lives during the operation of the Judeo-Christian obscenity and its offshoots. In this way all of society is subverted and manipulated into an insane deadly struggle over nothing. In case you have any doubt that it is their own demons that religious homophobes struggle with, consider the following: The claim that homosexuality is a lifestyle can only be made by somebody who believes that everybody could choose it. That includes the homophobes themselves. Most people realize that they could not choose that lifestyle, even if they wanted. However, with the lifestyle claim, the homophobes clearly show that they feel themselves open to the possibility of a homosexual “lifestyle.” In truth, they confess plainly that they are secretly repressed gays or at least have strong homoerotic leanings. So, of course, does every pushy Deuteronomist or Koran thumper. This is true for Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh as much as for George Bush or any Ayatollah or Mufti. It should be obvious that every moralist and ethicist betrays in plain text what his deepest wishes and desires are. Tell me your ethical preoccupations and I will tell you what you would really like to do behind closed doors. IV There is a simple solution to the dilemma posed by ethics, morals, values and virtues. The solution is to shuck them altogether. We can build a society in which we can take care of each other without morals and ethics, or, indeed, prisons and punishment. I will develop these thoughts in the future. All ethicists need to be strung up from the next tree. No matter how gentle, benign and full of goodwill they may appear - on the inside and by the fruits of their actions they are ravenous monsters. Religions, morals, and laws have failed us for 5000 years. We can do better. Category:Seminarist essays